Malcolm Fraser wins top literary prize

An autobiography by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has picked up the top prizes at the 2011 NSW Premier's Literary Awards in Sydney.

At a gala dinner at the Sydney Opera House on Monday night, Mr Fraser and Margaret Simons were awarded the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction as well as Book of the Year for Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs.

The judges said the book, which charts the 79-year-old's time in public life, was "an engaging work that demonstrates how literary craft can transcend the usual limitations of political autobiography".

The authors received a total of $50,000 in prize money.

Mr Fraser says he knew the book was on the right track after his wife, Tammie, started reading the drafts.

"I thought she would read a couple of pages and say 'I'll put that aside and read it later' but she picked up the draft and read them from front to finish and she said she was fascinated and was really interested and she's not really somebody who's greatly interested in political memoirs," he said.

Discussing the work, Mr Fraser revealed that despite their political differences, he saw his former adversary Gough Whitlam,"as a friend".

"I think Gough had grand ideas but he was, to put it kindly, not a good economic manager, he really wasn't", he said.

"He thought money fell out of the trees. He had a view of Australia as an independent nation. He would not have wanted to be a puppy dog to the United States and neither would have [former prime minister Paul] Keating, but recent prime ministers seem to want to do everything America wants."

Simons said that when Mr Fraser took office in 1975 people were acutely aware of the differences between he and Mr Whitlam.

"But I think viewed with the perspective of a number of decades, it's clear there was great deal of continuity between those two governments: respect for human rights, the rule of law, liberal values in the true sense of the word 'liberal', aboriginal land rights, freedom of information legislation, human rights commission - many initiatives that were started by Whitlam but were brought to bear by Fraser."

Australian fiction writer Alex Miller won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction as well as the People's Choice Award for his novel Lovesong.

Jennifer Maiden won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for her collection Pirate Rain, making her the first poet to win the prize three times.

Author Libby Gleeson received a special award for her numerous contributions to the children's book industry.

And Debra Oswald won the script writing award for television drama Offspring.

Over the course of the evening, $315,000 in prizes were given out across 13 categories.

The NSW Premier's Literary Awards, established in 1979, were Australia's first premier's awards.